FRAMEWORK FOR A KNOWLEDGE SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATIVE DESIGN PROJECTS

Engineering design projects are more and more often developed in network of R&D services of several companies. It is particularly the case of projects developed in the context of European Network of Excellence (NoE) grouping together 24 teams of expert researchers in the mechanical production field over 15 European countries. Such a research network is characterized by assignments that are detailed in the paper. One of them is new knowledge creation; it represents the core of the network assignments. Some tools already exist in order to support other assignments but no tool can support this one today. In this paper, we aim to characterize the process of new knowledge creation in collaborative and distributed scientific research context. Then we suggest some specifications and a framework for a system to support the creation of new knowledge in a context of distributed collaborative project of engineering design